The overall objective of this project is to estimate the relationship between age specific death rates and (a) a person's sociodemographic and economic characteristics at a point of time and over his life cycle and (b) physical, climatic and medical characteristics of the place where he lives. The primary data sources used to achieve these goals are the 1973 Current Population Survey -Social Security Exact Match sample (CPS-SSA) and the Retirement History Survey (RHS). For the current year our goals included putting these large surveys into usable form, and obtaining preliminary estimates of the effects of some important sociodemographic characteristics, and comparing our results with those obtained from the 1960 Census by Kitagawa and Hauser (KH).